If It’s Hip, It’s Gotta Be Omaha

Are you a young person in, let’s say, Orange County?

Are you tired of traffic? Tired of living with your parents because you can’t afford your own home or a cool apartment? Tired of living in a place with no sense of community? Looking for salt-of-the-earth types? A place where you can sink some roots?

Have I got a town for you.

I spent last week in my hometown of Omaha, which for as long as I can remember has fretted about losing its twentysomething population to other cities. A lot of the disaffection revolves around finding well-paying, entry-level jobs, but you know the other whine: There’s nothing to do here. It’s just not a hip place to be.

Call me crazy, but I get the distinct feeling it’s all changing in the Big O.

In just the last few years, Omaha has opened a concert hall and a performing arts center. They’re talking about building a new minor-league baseball park in a near-downtown area that long has been lying fallow. They’re converting old downtown-area buildings to spiffy condos and townhouses. One of the buzzwords in Omaha is “condomania.”

OK, there’s no beach, but there is a river. And it’s one of the best: the Missouri. The city has built a riverfront area, with restaurants and housing. And there are casinos on the Iowa side of the river.

The concert scene isn’t the local garage-band scene. The new QwestCenter has pulled in the Rolling Stones, U2 and Green Day.

And it’s not as though the local music scene is laughable. Far from it. Omaha has been written up in national publications as a focal point of the indie-rock scene.

Last weekend, Conor Oberst, an Omaha boy who fronts his band, Bright Eyes, gave a free outdoor concert. Last year, the Arizona Republic noted the musical importance of New York, San Francisco and Detroit, and went on to say: “Now add Omaha, Neb., to that list. For the past 10 years, the Great Plains city has been a hotbed of indie rock....”

Don’t take my word for it. While in town last week, I talked to Greg Logan, a member of ESPN’s crew televising the College World Series now underway. Here for his sixth tour of duty, Logan said the Series was “one of the most sought-after” assignments at the network, partly because of the guaranteed work but also because Omaha is seen as a friendly town with plenty of things to do. “It’s a metropolitan city that a lot of people don’t think of as being a metropolitan city,” Logan said.

In my new role as Omaha ambassador, I hit the streets of Orange County to sell the town. Kat Blasetti is a 23-year-old retail clerk who lives in Orange but understands the lure of elsewhere, having grown up in a small Idaho town.

“I grew up with simplicity,” she says, momentarily longing for the good ol’ days. “Everything is simpler. You don’t have a whole lot of chaos that we do in Southern California.”

Exactly. So how about Omaha? Blasetti, 23, says she and her husband wouldn’t want to raise a family that far away from their parents, who live here.

Fair enough, but I asked what she’d need in a non-California home. “Nice restaurants,” she says. “Movie theaters. Nice ones, too. And batting cages. I’m a baseball person. I’d need stuff close by so that I’m not driving three hours to go to the best shopping. I’d need stuff that’s within a half-hour so I can do all my stuff within a day.”

I know for a fact Omaha could accommodate her. I asked what she doesn’t like about California. “I hate the traffic,” she says. “I hate the amount of people, and I really don’t like the attitude from a lot of people. There’s a whole bunch of people that have money putting down people who don’t have money. People in smaller towns tend to care more about who you are rather than what designer you’re wearing that day.”

I can’t swear Omaha doesn’t have people like that, but I can guarantee there are fewer of them.

Still, my Omaha sell doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Tony Zamudio is 23 and lives in Santa Ana. After I told him of Omaha’s more relaxed atmosphere, he said, “I’m just used to this lifestyle. I wouldn’t want to slow down.”

I asked if he’d ever been to the Midwest. No, he hadn’t.

Any interest in checking it out? “Not really,” he said.

His impressions of it? “It sounds like it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Not exactly, but I get his point. It’s all about image.

But not that long ago, wasn’t there a county in Southern California with a reputation as a vast cultural wasteland that was decidedly uncool but suddenly transformed itself into the hip capital of America?

Yes, I’m sure there was.

What was the name of that place again?

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Dana Parsons’ column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at dana.parsonslatimes.com.